Steve and Cathy's Blog

Last night at 7:00pm, our ship Insignia left Mombasa. We will head due east for the next two days to cover the 1,080 miles to the Seychelles, an archipelago of 115 islands. We are leaving the continent of Africa behind, having made visits to eight countries. Granted, in the great scheme of things, this is the merest of introductions to the second-largest continent on earth that has fifty-four nations. We were taken on tours in air-conditioned

Another misleading title, as the ship spent the day in Mombasa as Cathy and I and about forty-five others flew in four small aircraft about an hour and fifteen minutes northwest of there to Amboseli National Park to spend the day on a game drive. Amboseli means “small tornado” in Swahili because indeed, there are many small, harmless, what we would call dust devils that arise out of the dust there. The park is 151 square

We arrive in Insignia Lounge right on time this morning at 8:30am, and it’s a good thing we did, as there are seven excursions heading out by 9:15. Ours, the Spice Tour, is an 8:45 departure, and will last four hours. We board Bus 31 and are greeted by our guide. He introduces himself this way: “My name is Wilton, but today, you may address me as Bus 31.” Now this is a good sign. A

The title of this post is misleading, because, while we indeed docked in this city of two-plus million, Cathy and Steve spent the day in the Selous Game Reserve, a 45-minute flight (in a 12-passenger aircraft) southwest of the city.   It is one of, if not the, largest game reserve on earth, covering an area of 19,000 square miles. Unfortunately, hunting is allowed on most of it, but the part we explored is reserved as a

The number of these Sea Days again gives us a sense of how big this planet really is. The distance between the last stop, Maputo, Mozambique, and our next stop, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania is 1,393 miles (as the crow flies, so to speak). The distance from Portland, ME to Miami FL is 1,354 miles. No wonder the captain decided to cut out the stop in Madagascar because of the winds and currents. Today is another

Now for sure I know it’s a Sea Day, and this is the unplanned one as were supposed to be on Nosy Be (pronounced No’ see Bay), Madagascar. The previous evening the captain announced the change in plans, and the Cruise Director declared that we were in a stepped up sanitation protocol as a couple of more cases of Acute Gastroenteritis (AG) had been reported. Since then, those had been the hot topics of conversation amongst

With the change in itinerary and getting almost a week behind on meeting my goal of sending a post for each day, I have somehow lost a Sea Day.  For all I can remember, the stuff I posted yesterday at Feb. 16th happened today, Feb. 17th.  However, I did find one photo taken on the 17th, and it was an interesting sunrise.  Do you see how hazy it seems?  That’s symbolic of my memory for this

As I am sure that anyone who reads this stuff will be grateful that we only have a few things to mention on the Sea Day.  The subjects will be breakfast, lunch and dinner.  Ha Ha.  Only kidding.  We have final overcome the urge to describe every morsel we eat, I promise. The three subjects are: Pirate drill, sanitation procedure ramp up and change in itinerary. Well, we find out today that we will enter another

We have been on the move since Cape Town, South Africa.  We are in need of some down time.  We figure that when we get to Maputo, Mozambique at 8:00am, all we have is a 2-hour walking tour of the city at 9:30 and we can call the rest Cathy and Steve’s Sea Day right at the dock.  Sounds like a plan. But the plan doesn’t quite work out.  On our way from Richards Bay to

This is one of the youngest towns in South Africa. While Sir Frederick Richards, for whom the town is named, established this as a makeshift port during the Anglo-Zulu War in 1879, it wasn’t much to see until 1965 when the South African government decided to build a deepsea port in 1965. Construction on the port began in 1972, was completed in 1976 along with a railway and an oil/gas pipeline connecting it to Johannesburg. Its